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ANDY

REVIEWED B Y:

BRYAN JOE KATO BEN MATT REINER MILLER

JEFF KYLE DANIEL KIM BRIAN TIM JEFF M BERTZ

Capturing Sound With Foley ArtMany factors come into play for creating immersive audio, but the most crucial step is gathering sound and mixing it with gameplay elements. Foley is an audio technique that consists of producing sounds that simulate realism. Major studios often have internal teams of specialists that employ this method, such as Dead Space 3’s sound designers striking a water-melon with an ax to mimic crushing limbs.

Indie studios, on the other hand, can be constricted by funding limitations. Creating original sound through Foley is a difficult task, especially if the developer has no sound-design background. For Monaco: What’s Yours is Mine, Pocketwatch Games had to work with minimal resources. Using a low-quality microphone, creator Andy Schatz simulated the sound of a muffled chloroform attack. All other effects were borrowed from royalty-free sound banks.

The sounds Schatz used were sets of compiled Foley work, composed of sources ranging from household items to outdoor ambience. For instance, the sound of healing a character in Monaco is actu-ally a person’s hands grabbing the mushy insides of a pumpkin. “It sounded like you were trying to stuff their guts back in so I ran with it,” Schatz says.

Because the game takes place in Monaco, the guards and civilians utter short French phrases to reflect the setting. Acquiring these voices was accom-plished through crowd sourcing, with help from a French gaming site, Factor News. “I still don’t actually know what the enemies are saying,” Schatz says.

While Pocketwatch had to work around these limi-tations, some indie studios hire professional sound designers to create audio effects for their games. Limbo creators Playdead hired electroacoustic com-poser turned sound designer Martin Stig Anderson to produce sounds for the 2010 black-and-white plat-former. Using antique analog equipment, he attempted to capture the character of 1930s films.

Anderson made every sound in Limbo, from the foot steps of the boy, created from the subtle screech of a skimming record needle, to giant spiders, which were originally the sounds of swaying branches and spears piercing dirt. “Take the lonely bird you hear in the forest,” he says. “If you took a high-quality record-ing of a bird song and placed it in the otherwise bleak world of Limbo, the illusion would break.” He captured the sound of a bird chirping with a wire-recorder, a device that records sound on wire as thin as hair. “The result that you hear in the game is pretty bleak and grim, like an echo of a distant past,” he says.

Using Ambience to Produce AtmosphereAmbient sound is used to highlight a mood, atmo-sphere, and a sense of place. It is one of the most common uses of sound across all games, and certain indie studios excel in its production. It is an economi-cal yet effective method for making the game world feel real, rather than relying on high-definition graph-ics. Ambience usually reflects the art style or story by bringing it to life through audio.

To enrich Kentucky Route Zero with ambient sound, Cardboard Computer went the extra mile – literally. Sound designer Ben Babbitt recorded audio across Europe while on tour with his band, Pillars and Tongues. The result was a mix of ambience that adds tremendous atmosphere to the game.

Kentucky Route Zero tells the tale of a secret under ground highway, and the mysterious folks that inhabit the area. It boasts a surreal art style with gradi ent backgrounds and silhouetted characters, creating a minimalist design that fits its rural set-ting. The ambience supports these themes, with a softly toned soundtrack that has a touch of bluegrass flavor.

On-location recording techniques that Babbitt used paid off. The clips he collected included the moan of an old, rusty mill wheel in a small town near Toulouse; stones skipping across a river in Italy; and the still, low hums of a quiet road in Serbia. Finding these European sounds in a game about rural Kentucky may seem strange, but what’s most surprising is how well it fits in this point-and-click adventure’s eerie world.

“Most of the story in the game takes place at night in rural Kentucky, and that happens to be a very quiet time and place,” Babbitt says. “A more ambient focus works in a kind of unobtrusive way within that slow-ness and quietness in the game world.”

The flashlight flickers. Your vision blurs as your pace picks up into an unsteady run. Echoes of deep thuds, like a monster’s giant footsteps, slowly become louder. Finally, a faceless man fills the screen, and his unwelcome appearance is met with a disturbing static that invades your eardrums.

Can you imagine playing Slender on mute? Without its foreboding audio, it would be a completely different and undeniably worse experience.

Slenderman’s appearance alone would shock us less, leaving us disenchanted by the experience with no growing sense of fear.

Sound is an integral component to all game design, but it becomes even more criti-cal for indie studios. Working under restricted budgets, indies often can’t compete with the graphical fidelity of blockbuster releases. Especially when using a minimalist design, innovative use of sound can drive player engagement when other areas are lacking. Indie studios are free to pursue their creative risks and take them to new heights without the constant pressure of publishers.

This reality is a driving factor in why some of the most progressive and intuitive sound design is found in indie games today. Sound can be overlooked or taken for granted, as it affects players in unconscious ways, from emotional impact to more active immersion. From the unpredictability of procedurally generated soundtracks to using household items to simulate realistic sounds, certain indie teams are using sound in creative and unexpected ways.

by Elise Favis

Limbo

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If there were one word to describe sound design in Kentucky Route Zero, it would be “quiet.” No voice work was done for the ample amount of dialogue, but there were specific intentions behind this. Playing Kentucky Route Zero is similar to reading a good book. “I think you end up concentrating or paying attention to the game in a different way with the dialogue as text rather than voice recordings, maybe in a more active way,” Babbitt says.

Limbo had no music soundtrack besides the gritty, ominous noises emanating from the surrounding environments. It helped enhance the game’s bleak, desolate tone by having both the graphics and audio complement one another.

“I think Limbo required a minimalistic yet immersive soundscape that would root the player in the game world,” Anderson says. “Abandoning the traditional backing track was one of the means to achieve this.”

Limbo’s ambience changes from subtle to power-ful, with some areas using natural sounds, to more mechanical “white noise” effects in later levels. Anderson believes that volume control and its balance with gameplay are significant to master ambience in video games. “One thing I disliked when playing games was the lack of dynamics,” he says. “I think that they were shouting at me all the time. Limbo mostly whis-pers, yet the game doesn’t hesitate to show its teeth when it counts.”

Use of ambience becomes particularly important for horror games, to create a sense of foreboding, fear, and tension. While Limbo has glimpses of horror, it is not distinctly classified under the genre. In comparison, Montreal indie studio Red Barrels created the horror game Outlast, focusing on manipulating sounds and ambience to scare the player.

Jonathan Wachoru is the sound designer behind the disturbing noises of creaking doors, footsteps, and moans that make the asylum in Outlast a terrifying experience. “My approach was to consider the asylum like a character with all his darkness, specifications, and personality,” he says. “I really wanted to create something ‘alive.’”

Wachoru was full of ideas, but due to time

con straints, not all could be implemented. He wanted to give the player the ability to amplify in-game sounds by zooming in with the video camera on certain areas, but the mechanic didn’t make it to the final game.

Wachoru focused on creating sounds of shuffling and movement that had an unidentifiable source to increase the player’s fear and confusion. Additionally, the main character’s breath dynamically shifts, depending on whether enemies are nearby. “I needed different stress levels of breath, from quieter to more intense, as well as some voice reactions,” he says. “It was a way to smoothly increase tension [without] music.”

Dynamic effects such as these can be applied to games in many ways, through the use of adaptive sound.

The Evolving Beats Of Adaptive SoundAdaptive audio is perfect for video games due to their highly interactive nature. Music that adjusts to the player’s progression or to the themes of the story can add tension or change the tone of a scene. Nintendo is known for using adaptive soundtracks in many of its franchises, from Legend of Zelda to Super Mario. The melody in the overworld of New Super Mario Bros. smoothly changes instruments when switching between certain areas. Adaptive music isn’t necessarily new, but indie games such as Monaco: What’s Yours is Mine, Device 6, and Sound Shapes have used these techniques in original ways.

Monaco has an original adaptive piano score com-posed by the Grammy-nominated musician Austin Wintory. With a busted, out-of-tune piano, Wintory composed a sequence of music that thematically resembled “off-kilter” heist music – an ideal fit for the world of Monaco. “The Monaco of my mind is bright lights, dark shadows, yachts, and dice,” Schatz says.

From gameplay cues to player interaction, the soundtrack adapts to each situation. The offbeat piano tune seamlessly transitions in pace and tone, when players move from one floor to the next or become detected. Even in its level design, the music modifies to reflect the player’s progression. Schatz describes Monaco as “carefree, in a sort of offensively

osten ta tious way.” In Monaco, players are not meant to feel guilty about theft, and its sound design was designed to support that ideology.

With adaptive audio, the soundtrack risks sound-ing more mechanical than organic if it isn’t crafted well. Having music adapt without losing its flow is one of the biggest challenges Pocketwatch faced. “In Monaco, there's the more obvious change from sneaky to frantic when you take damage from an enemy, but there’s other more subtle elements of interactivity too,” Schatz says.

Simogo’s Device 6, a mobile text adventure heavily influenced by 1960s espionage films, showcased its own unique use of adaptive sound by combining it with literature. Audio cues, such as the sound of chatter slowly amplifying when entering a new room, empha-sized a sense of atmosphere and place in a game with minimal visuals. Every piece of the game pulls off an interactive feel, with simple actions such as swiping text from left to right dynamically affecting the visuals and audio.

“We wanted to make something based around text, but didn't want to make a traditional text-based game,” says Device 6 co-developer Simon Flesser. “We want-ed users to feel immersed in the ongoing story, so we used sounds to enhance the narrative.”

Device 6 doesn’t use sound solely to drive the nar-rative, but also as a tool for gameplay. The puzzles in the game have audio clues, along with the visual and text-based ones. It forces the player to listen closely to progress further. “The music is certainly very important, but the use of music might be even more important than the music itself,” Flesser says. “There is a lot of music in the game, but it’s used very distinctively.”

The platformer Sound Shapes applies adaptive sound to player progression, similar to Monaco’s mechanics. Each action the player takes molds the soundtrack in some form. Obtaining collectibles adds a new beat to the melody, and obstacles such as crush-ing blocks act as percussion in the tune. Advancing through the level moves the song forward simultane-ously, along with objects and shapes pulsing rhythmi-cally to the beat.

No Man’s Sky

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ANDY

REVIEWED B Y:

BRYAN JOE KATO BEN MATT REINER MILLER

JEFF KYLE DANIEL KIM BRIAN TIM JEFF M BERTZ

The Art Of Visualized MusicSeeing sound visualized on-screen is an approach often employed by rhythm games, but this technique is expanding into genres not normally associated with music. Ubisoft’s Child of Eden combines music with action, having the player shoot objects that emanate a sound upon their destruction. These sounds smoothly blend into the overall soundtrack, adding new elements to the song. Creator Tetsuya Mizuguchi pioneered the concept back in the early 2000s with his hypnotic rail shooter Rez, which heavily influenced Child of Eden’s gameplay.

Visualized music often uses adaptive sound. A good example is the collectible music notes found in Super Mario Galaxy. Each collectible plays a note when it is obtained, so collecting them all in a timely fashion cre-ates a song.

Indie games are especially innovative when exploring visualized music in genres like puzzle, adventure, and even horror. Ephemerid, a musical adventure game, fea-tures a rock-ballad soundtrack that is visualized through colorful scenes. One segment’s flashing spotlights change color in response to the music, and a row of rainbow fireflies fly upward all at once with every strum of the soundtrack’s guitar.

Dark Echo, a mobile horror game that visualizes each sound you make, uses red and white to notify the player of danger and safety. Dark Echo was origi-nally a flash game created to compete in the 48 hour Ludum Dare game jam. The theme of the competition asked developers to use minimalist visuals to represent sounds, which influenced the game’s design entirely. “Part of the reason why it's been effective is that it makes for a unique experience,” says developer Jason Ennis of the two-person studio RAC7.

In Dark Echo, the player navigates through a hallway escaping a killer, but everything in the world is made of lines. These appear with each step forward, which creates a path to follow. However, every noise made attracts the killer as well. Originally, Dark Echo wasn’t intended to be a horror experience, but the developers changed its tone when hearing feedback from players.

“Once it was apparent the game frightened some players, the audio moved in a direction to complement

this,” Ennis says. “This had some influence from the Dark Souls series, which made good use of ambient music and ominous sound effects.”

Building Procedurally Generated SoundProcedural generation is a popular term usually asso-ciated with roguelikes and certain action/RPGs like Bloodborne. Restarting a stage offers a new experi-ence each time, by randomly generating the enemies and surroundings. Applying this to music has a similar effect to adaptive sound, however the two have some key differences. While adaptive audio is a fully written music track that reacts and adapts to in-game events,

procedural audio is composed of ever-changing music created through coding and computer programs. The concept has been attempted in past games, such as the 2008 Maxis game Spore. Composer Brian Eno designed the game to have audio that was as proce-dural as the game itself, and coined the term “genera-tive sound.” This same method is being applied by Hello Games for No Man’s Sky.

Paul Weir, audio director for the upcoming space adventure, is attempting to convince listeners that what they are listening to is, “real music, but it is actually kind of computer controlled music.”

“Much in the way that you can get complex behavior in A.I., I’d like to apply that idea to music,” he said during his talk on implementing never-ending audio in video games at the Indievelopment 2014 conference.

No Man’s Sky runs entirely on procedural generation. Even the developers are unaware of what awaits on certain planets. Weir’s work has the same objective, but achieved with audio. Weir is working alongside the band 65DaysOfStatic to create a procedurally gener-ated soundscape that seamlessly blends with the procedural world. During his talk, Weir said, “No Man’s Sky is a really good motivator for trying to have an audio engine that does more than just play linear music or loops.”

Generative audio is ambitious, and Weir points out in his talk that the difficulty is creating aesthetically pleasing music with the technology. Because of its pro-grammed structure, it can sound jagged and mechani-cal, sharing the same difficulties that adaptive music faces. With No Man’s Sky, Weir is bringing this tech-nique to mainstream audiences, which could influence future sound designers and programmers alike.

Changing The Way We ListenMajor studios have the advantage of large teams and budgets. With indies struggling financially, less resourc-es means making do with what you have. Sometimes, this can lead to creative wellsprings, as we have seen with the novel scare attempts of Outlast and Device 6’s unique combination of audio and literature. With virtual reality on the horizon, audio will become more signifi-cant for creating a sense of presence in games. Indies are changing not just how we play, but how we listen, by introducing breakthrough ideas that allow for a deeper connection to the virtual world. \

Kentucky Route Zero

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